Slashdot Mirror
New Developments in Music Technology
jonerik writes "The Christian Science Monitor has this article on acoustic and electronic music technology, including a visit to MIT's Hyperinstruments lab, which has developed a series of Music Shapers; ball-shaped musical toys which are covered with 'a patented thread containing sensors that react to the way the child handles them. The child manipulates a preprogrammed "little seed" of music and helps it "grow" by the way he or she shapes it.' Also worth a read is this article (free reg required) on the Line 6 series of bass and guitar amp emulators, which do a pretty decent job of mimicking various amp or amp/stack combos; from a '53 Fender Deluxe to a mid-'60s Vox AC-30 to the sludgy murk of a '70s Orange stack. 'Line 6 uses a technology called modeling to measure the characteristics of a particular vintage amp, from the distortion of its original tubes to the resonance of its speaker cabinet. The company has developed a way to reproduce those measurements in a powerful D.S.P., or digital signal processing, chip that contains models of dozens of classic amps.'"
This well end up in techno / rave music, I just know it :) DJs can't resist anything technological that makes new sounds... On the other hand, that works out good for me, since I have no musical talent and love techno music...
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
There is this dominant misconception in the experimental music community which equates advancement in interactivity with branching. There is the implication that people want to follow potential branches down certain paths in a musical piece, like they do in a game. When I studied music, one of my teacher, Elliott Carter remarked on this problem that in music there was a 'best branch' and that branch should be the composition.
I don't believe that people get anything out of explorable musical branching. They miss the powerful attitudes and completeness of the gestalt of the combination performance and composition statement.
This type of research also mistakenly equates play and exploration with the acquisition of musical knowledge. Playing with layers of music, turning off and on beat patterns, minimalist chord patterns (pretty much what these squishy toys do, btw) does not teach one how to compose. It may teach them to listen, but not in the same way that something like the Suzuki method does. There are plenty of stupid Flash toys on the web which allow you to make music like this. What do you garner from this play?
To me, this all rings of rationalizing the computing experience as an art education experience by re-thinking musical education in such a radical way that music itself is re-evaluated (to my thinking mis-evaluated).
And this is research for self-promotion. You'd be amazed how often this guy, Machover gets in the press with these toys and his Hyper-Instruments. Sure, they're fun to play with, but give a kid a drum set and a few lessons and (s)he'll really learn something. Music.
idealord music
If the musicians strike, the producers say they'll substitute "virtual orchestras" without any live players. They believe audiences won't be able to tell the difference.
This might apply for some Broadway shows, but the majority of productions depend on the interaction between the conductor and the performers. I perform in a renaissance dance troupe, and not only will our musicians adjust their playing for what we're doing, but there's a palpable energy in our interactions with the band. Actors and dancers aren't machines; performing to recorded music can be unforgiving.
I also noticed this watching Cirque du Soleil's new production Dralion -- one of the acrobats in a "solo" took a misstep needed and a moment longer to get back into position; the musicians slowed minutely to give him time to recover.
What you get is a sequence of digital slices lined up in a way that mimics the original waveform. The problem is that it sounds grainy and "processed", and its easy to tell the difference between that and the real thing.
The question is, how fine do the slices need to be cut before you can't tell the difference between a series of digital slices and an analog waveform? If not 24-bit tech, what about 128? Maybe it will be too expensive to truly capture analog sounds with digital technology.
This is a real problem, because fewer and fewer companies make tubes any more and there are a lot of us guitar players who still are not satisfied with the way these modelling amps sound.
Perhaps the advent of quantum computing will provide the solution. After all, if something can be both a particle and a wave, then maybe we will have real waveforms to work with in order to create sounds.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
How many 300-year-old songs didn't last, though? I bet 99% of it was crap back then too.
These 'sophisticated hyperinstruments' AKA 'Load of Balls', look to me like re-packaged tamagotchi technology.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Okay, I'm not a parent, but I play one on TV.
I'm not strictly a luddite, either, but I think it's tremendously important that toys given to children not be technological black boxes. The true fallout of the current generation of playstation zombies won't be any sort of attention span issues or predilection towards violence, but the total lack of intellectual stimulation and natural curiousity brought on by the use of toys that discourage (or forbid, thanks to the DMCA) tinkering and explorative destruction/reconstruction.
Hey - I don't work for any of these companies or own their stock. But I do own several vintage Fender & Marshall amps, tons of discrete audio processing gear, and have a nice home studio. I have to say that my Line6 AxSys 212 amp, coupled with Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 6 audio software, allows me to tap into an incredible array of sonic possibilities that would be very time consuming and expensive using non-digital technology. Sure, there are some disadvantages (such as the learning curve - digital is very different than analog, but that shouldn't be much of a problem for the ./ crowd) but overall the quality can be amazing. For example, I compared a master tape recording, utilizing a 65' Fender Deluxe Black Panel amp, Sennheiser 421 mics, and multi-track analog tape, against the equivalent Line6 patch (seasoned to taste of course) direct to disk. I could not tell the guitar tracks apart (and yes you can get feedback at low volumes if that's your cup o' tea)! Coupled with the enhanced productivity and relatively low cost, digital modeling is an attractive alternative to the old school way of processing a signal chain. Not to mention that you can do all of this in the privacy of your headphones, or your apartment, or with the baby sleeping, etc. Very high bang for yer' buck ratio, in my opinion.
Since the Line6 products at the time were cheaper, they sold better. Tube amp purists wouldn't touch either product, so it was left to those of us who either didn't care, or weren't irrationally biased against the fledgling technology. I guess to many people, any difference in sound between the products was worth the savings in buying a Line6. Plus, Line6 seemed to have the far superior marketing team. So while Johnson struggled to carve out their little niche, Line6 grew and flourished.
Now, unfortunately, Johnson has all but gone out of business (I believe they were a spin-off of Digitech, which is still going strong). I bought a J-Station about 2 years ago and have loved it as well. Again, I felt it sounded slightly better than the Line6 Pod, but then maybe I was biased for Johnson by then. It's too bad that they didn't have the marketing team to compete better and stay alive - as many of us here say, diversity and competition is always a good thing.
Other companies have been entering the fray in the last couple of years (Fender Cyber-Twin, etc), so certainly there is still some competition and great things to look forward to in the future. I'm just a little sad that I won't get to see what the Johnson engineers might have come up with next. Hopefully they're still working on similar things, either at Digitech or other companies.
One of these days I'll have to pick up a Pod (or whatever the Line6 equivalent is these days) just to add more sounds to my arsenal. Should be great.
Say hello to zMac.
I have a Line 6 Guitar Port and all I have to say is that it is absolutely FANTASTIC! For $150 you get 6 classic guitar amps + effects + cabinets emulated 100% digital straight into your recording software and it sounds great.
Now, of course, you can ALWAYS get a better sound in a recording studio with the real equipment, but you are going to spend $1000's of dollars doing so.
I wish I had had this thing before I bought my Mesa Boogied DC5 a few years ago. I absolutely hated that guitar amp! If I had had a Line 6 Guitar port, I could have experimented with amps and effects and determined long ago that I should have bought a Marshal amp. I know you can try them out at the store (and you still should), but the hours you can spend with the Guitar Port narrowing down the list of possible candidates is worth it.
Digital music technology has come a long way (and boy is it getting cheap). If you haven't checked some of this stuff out (especially the Line 6 brand hardware) you're really doing yourself a disservice as a musician.
Bryan
Do we look forward to the day when the recording industry has intervened with guitar manufacturers and the only guitars you can buy are MIDI guitars that have embedded technology to prevent playing of copyrighted music?
Are you paranoid, or just retarded?
No, I got it. You're karma whoring -- suggest something bad about the recording industry and/or Hilary Rosen's personal hygeine and watch those (+1 Insightful)'s roll it!
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.... There's just not enough of a market for effects and stomp-boxes to encourage the kind of R&D needed to get awesome/realistic sounds out of today's gear.
I mean, you only have to take a look at the synthesizer business to get an idea what I'm talking about.
Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!
When you're looking at something like a wah pedal that'll sell for under $149 or so, retail, when it's all said and done - how much are you going to pour into design research on it? Don't forget the fact that these things will only end up being sold mail order through musician's catalogs and at music stores. People won't be picking them up at their local WalMart or Best Buy store.
Right now, if I was a tube amp manufacturer, I'd probably try to maximize my return by recycling tried and true designs that I already kow sound good to most people. The majority of my buyers are either going to be A) younger kids who never heard the original design from 20-30 years ago anyway, or B) working musicians who are trying to replace their old gear that finally wore out - and would likely buy a new "work/sound-alike" of their old standby.
For something as cheap as a stomp-box or wah pedal though, I'd just have an E.E. throw together a cheap to build circuit that sounded "good enough" and go with it.
My first "real" amp was a '68 Fender Bassman with a 4X12 cabinet. Sounded really great, but was loud as hell. I tried taming it with a powersoak (resistive dummy load) but kept hearing that a powersoak will kill your amp. Then I bought a THC Hot Plate (an inductive/resistive dummy load) which was a HUGE improvement tonewise. The problem is still that the rig is tube powered and heavy and space intensive. And as much as I LOVE the tone of a tube amp, it will always sound the same way.
I decided to start looking at modeling amps. I bought a Korg Pandora as an easy way to have something that sounded like a variety of amps that I could carry in my pocket. After that, I made the leap and bought a Line6 Pod. I LOVE the pod!!!
It sounds a LOT like my Fender amp and a Marshall AND a Mesa Boogie AND a whole lot more amps than I could fit into a room and costs a WHOLE lot less.
Those with golden ears will always poo-poo modeling amps, but for us regular folk, modeling amps will let you play with sounds you couldn't achieve before.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.